Art in Review; Josef Albers/Donald Judd

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: April 29, 2005

This vivacious, museum-quality exhibition is a call-and-response echo chamber of levitating squares and rectangles of color. Some inspirit the paintings and prints by Josef Albers (1888-1976). The others are embodied in the sculptures and prints of Donald Judd (1928-94), leader of the so-called Minimal Art movement.

Despite the 40-year age difference, the two artists look strikingly simpatico. Both loved color, and decided that straightforward planes of it, whether in oil paint or Plexiglas, were the shortest path to complexity. Both approached their art with a pragmatism and a love of the physical that was almost mystical.

A product and proponent of the Bauhaus, Albers turned from furniture design to painting after emigrating to the United States in 1933, translating his ideas about color into pulsating abstract paintings of concentric squares. These squares within squares were, for Judd, who segued from painting into sculpture, furniture design and architecture, ''one of the best ideas in the world.'' What was really great about them, though, was that they were off square; each was placed a little low in the larger one, creating a rhythmic, irregular recession.

At Alexander, the majestic enfilade of grays and greens that is Albers's ''Study for Homage to the Square (Spring Starting)'' of 1962 shares a wall with six Judd woodblock prints that measure out three shades of cadmium yellow in positive and negative rectangles. Positive and negative merge in a translucent Judd floor box: two sheets of metal, plus three sheets of orange Plexiglas, plus five wires.

In his embossed drawings in ink, Albers bent planes into geometric structures that resembled Judd's furniture, while Judd made parallel lines in a wall relief by inserting slabs of blue Plexiglas into a sheet of folded aluminum. Judd could blast away with cadmium red light and purple, as in an early stepped floor piece, or lower the volume to a gray-on-gray whisper in a wall box of Plexiglas and aluminum. Albers clinched black and deep red between two shades of blue, but also eked two colors from a single band of deep green by scraping half of it down until the canvas glowed through.

Judd may have admired Albers's squares within squares, but he couldn't find a way to use more than two colors in his sculptures until his Lascaux series of the early 1980's. These aggregates of shallow open pans individually painted and screwed together added new and needed twists to his cardinal principles of real color, materials and space. It is not hard to see their syncopated honeycombs of rectangles beside, above and below rectangles as homages to Albers's homages to the square. ROBERTA SMITH